Resumo de Book Of Facts - Reader's Digest

SPIES AND SPYING

OPENING THE MALLS

Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), the Macedonian who conquered much of Asia in his twenties, is credited with inventing a spying technique that is still widely used today. During his campaigns in the Middle East and Asia between 334 and 326 BC, Alexander gauged his officers? loyalty by encouraging them to write letters home. He then intercepted the mail to discover and eliminate potential malcontents.

FIFTH COLUMN

One of the earliest known spying coups occurred in 539 BC when the Persian leader Cyrus the Great (ruled 559-530 BC) recruited secretly a force of dissident Babylonian priests to help him defeat Belshazzar, the ruler of Babylon. Although the nature of the priests? help is not known, Babylonian documents show that Cyrus?s soldiers were able to enter the city without having to fight their way in.

TUDOR SPYMASTER

Sir Francis Drake, the English naval Commander who played bowls during the approach of the Spanish Armada in 1588, could afford to be nonchalant because the English already knew of the enemy invasion plans. The English intelligence was provided by a secret service organization created by Sir Francis Walsingham. Sir Francis, one of Elizabeth I?s leading advisors, recruited agents in England and sent them to operate as ?deep cover? spies in enemy territory. One spy, Anthony Standen, styled himself as a courtier named Pompeo Pellegrini and penetrated the entourage of the Marquis de Santa Cruz, Grand Admiral of the Spanish fleet. By intercepting letters between Santa Cruz and Philip II of Spain, Standen was able to warn his master of the preparations for the Armada in 1587- months before it sailed to defeat.

CAUGHT BY€CIDENT

Between 1945 and 1972, Britain?s security services captured only one Soviet spy without American help- and even that was by accident. In April 1952 an M15 surveillance expert was on his way home for lunch when, as he got off a bus in Kingston, London, he spotted a Soviet diplomat talking to a young man. The unknown man was trailed and found to be a 24-year-old radio operator named William Marshall, who worked for Britain?s Diplomatic Wireless Service, handling secret radio transmissions to and from British embassies around the world. Three months later, Marshall was caught red handed selling secrets to the Russian diplomat and was jailed for five years.

CRACKING THE ENIGMA

Fifteen thousand people kept the secret of one of Britain?s most important intelligence advantages during the Second World War. The 15000 were employed by the British Secret intelligence Service, M16, at Bletchley Park, a Buchinghamshire country estate, monitoring and decoding Germany?s most secret communications. At the heart of their achievement was the German Enigma code machine and? a simple weather report.
Each morning at dawn, a German double agent prepared- with the help of the British Security Service, M15- a routine weather report. The report was transmitted to German Abwehr chiefs in Hamburg, then coded on the Enigma machine and sent on to Berlin.
The codes used on the Enigma were regarded by the Germans as unbreakable and, as an extra safeguard; the codes were altered each day. In fact all the precautions were useless. By monitoring the coded signal to Berlin and comparing it with the original weather report, the Bletchley code- breakers were able to work out the Enigma code for the day within a few hours of dawn. The rest of the day?s messages could then be deciphered almost as soon as they were transmitted.

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